Updated 6:52 p.m.
Don Sinex, who eight years ago launched Burlington’s CityPlace project, has sold his 50% stake in the beleaguered venture’s first phase to three local businesspeople.
Local construction company owners Dave Farrington, Jr., Al Senecal and Scott Ireland already owned half the project. They now take it over entirely from Sinex, the trio announced Friday.
“With this turn of events the partners are excited and look forward to bringing this long awaited project to fruition,” Farrington wrote in a statement.
The deal affects only a planned 10-story residential building slated for the site currently known as “the pit,” a vacant city block between Bank and Cherry streets. That building is expected to bring more than 400 units into Burlington’s tight housing market, with at least 80 of them being deemed affordable through a partnership with the Champlain Housing Trust.
Sinex, Farrington, Senecal and Ireland still collectively own the former Burlington mall, which the developers have said would be redeveloped in a second phase of the project. A proposed third phase of the project would revamp the former Macy’s building, which now serves as the temporary site of Burlington High School.
Sinex helmed CityPlace through years of stalled work and failures to obtain financing. He sold the majority of the project to the mammoth real estate development firm Brookfield in 2019. But after scaling back the project’s design, the firm ceded control to Sinex and the three businesspeople in 2020.
Since 2016, the project has been targeted by a barrage of lawsuits; in some of those cases, Sinex fired back with lawsuits of his own.
But as of this week, both sides have come to a verbal agreement to end the legal fighting, said attorney John Franco, a key opponent of the project. The verbal agreement won’t become final until it’s put in writing and submitted to court, he said.
“Hopefully this will be wrapped up in a week, but I don’t know,” Franco told VTDigger.
The lawsuits Franco filed took issue with aspects of the project’s design, such as parking. After years of wrangling, though, both parties have preliminarily agreed to get rid of a previous settlement that each side claimed the other violated, and establish a new settlement with a more narrowed focus.
“My clients, they had their fill of fighting about this,” Franco said. “That’s the only way to put it.”
When asked if the verbal agreement (reached on Tuesday) was related to Sinex’s departure, Franco said he did not know about any imminent changes in the project’s ownership status until they were announced on Friday.
But Franco also told VTDigger he had engaged directly with Farrington earlier this year in an effort to reach a settlement. “I just get the sense that (Sinex) was going to be a lot more resistant to any settlement than the people that bought him out,” he said.
“I think (Sinex) liked to fight about stuff,” Franco said. “He had a track record of doing that.”
Sinex, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat, praised the change in ownership as a “major step” for the city, billing it as an opportunity to welcome “dramatic growth of the City’s property tax base that we have been persistently working toward for years.”
“This project will now be led by committed, experienced, local partners who have a long record of delivering successful building projects in our community,” Weinberger said in a written statement.
The mayor joined hands with Sinex in 2014 to sell the project as a boon for the declining downtown mall. But he soured on Sinex after the developer failed to make good on deadlines, leading the city to mount a lawsuit against the venture.
That suit ended in a settlement guaranteeing that — if the project fails to get underway by September — the developers, and not the city, would pay for one of Burlington’s initial reasons for backing the project: the reconnection of Pine and St. Paul streets, two north-south thoroughfares that were split by the former mall.
But even though the city’s development chief previously said he does not think the developers will meet that deadline, Weinberger said on Friday that using city-bonded money for the street reconnections “remains a viable part of the plan.”
